Systematic Theology - Church

The Church of the Resurrection

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 28

Dictation Name: 28 The Church of the Resurrection

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy hast given us such great promises in thy word, has made us partakers of the blessedness that is ours through Jesus Christ and his resurrection. We come to thee joyfully this day to commit ourselves into thy care, to cast our every care upon thee who carest for us, to celebrate the victory that is ours in Jesus Christ, and the end of the powers of darkness because Christ is risen from the dead. Bless us this day in thy service, and make us ever joyful in the power of his resurrection. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our subject this day is on the Church of the Resurrection, and our scripture is Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians 2:1-10. “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”

The church of Jesus Christ rests on a miracle. It was born out of a miracle, the resurrection of our Lord. No resurrection, no church we would have to say. The existence of the church depends upon the fact of the resurrection. Wherever the resurrection of our Lord is denied, the church begins to whither and becomes merely a dead body cluttering the landscape. The miracle on which the church stands is the fact that Jesus Christ who was crucified, rose again from the dead in the very same body, and by his death and resurrection, destroyed the power of sin and death. Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians 15:17, when he says, “If Christ be not raised your faith is vain. Ye are yet in your sins.” The true church, thus, rests on a miracle, and in the power of that miracle. Both church and members live a miraculous and providential life in Jesus Christ. The church cannot, therefore, see itself simply as an institution. It is the power and presence of God the Son in history, and it is informed and guided by God the Spirit.

The formal gathering of the church as an institution came after the resurrection and the ascension. The miracle of Christ’s resurrection is a miracle of our regeneration, the one leads to the other. We are raised up, Paul says, together and he had made us to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. The exaltation of our Lord is the exaltation of humanity.

Now, it is important for us to emphasize that our text, Ephesians 2:1-10, deals with the church. All too often these verses are discussed in an individualistic fashion, as though the only object of all this, the only point Paul is here making, is our regeneration. Paul emphatically speaks of our regeneration, but in the verses which precede it, verses 20-23 of chapter 1, he speaks of the wonderful miracle, the working of his mighty power, God’s mighty power, “Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” What is Paul’s point?

What he is saying in Ephesians is that God, by the working of his mighty power, raised up Jesus Christ from the dead, and put all things under his feet, and created the church, and made possible the miracle that takes place in us, so that Paul is speaking, in the second chapter, about the church. In the fifth chapter, he goes on to speak of the church and the analogy of marriage and the church, so that what he is telling us in verses 1-10 of the second chapter is that Christ, having been resurrected, establishes his church and then creates a new creation, his people, to be his kingdom and his church, so that everything in these verses has to be yes, with us as individuals, and with the church. Christ, he tells us, is raised up into dominion, and he has set him at his own right hand in heavenly places, far above all principality in power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, and then, he tells us that we are delivered, delivered from the dominion of the things of this world, the prince of the powers of this realm, Satan. Who, when he tempted mankind, in Genesis 3:1-5, led them under his dominion into sin and death, but now we are delivered from that dominion to the dominion of Christ and given dominion, because Paul says, in verse 20, that God, having raised up Jesus Christ, makes him to sit at his right hand, his own right hand, in the heavenly places, and in the sixth verse of the second chapter, he comes back to that, and says that, God has raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. This is one of the most amazing statements in the entire epistle of Paul to the Ephesians. We, having been delivered from the realm of disobedience into the realm of obedience, sit together with Christ. What does that mean? It is something no theologian would dare say if it were not in scripture.

Christ, we are told, is enthroned, in the twentieth verse of the first chapter. He is King of kings, and Lord of lords. In the ancient world, when you went into the presence of the king, you prostrated yourself. You fell down on your face before him and you kissed his feet, if he so gave you the privilege. It was an honor to be allowed to stand in his presence. If you were allowed to sit with him, he made you a member of his family, if you sat at his table and you became a prince by grace, but to sit with him and to reign with him is an enthronement. So, what Paul is telling us, that we who, in Adam, were created to be priests, prophets, and kings, but because of our sin, fell from that estate, and became instead slaves to sin, and children of death, children of wrath, now become in Jesus Christ, enthroned. We sit together with him in heavenly places.

One of the most amazing statements in all of scripture, an audacious one. We are called to dominion. We are called to reign with Christ, called to exercise his dominion and power over all men and nations, and to bring them into captivity to Jesus Christ and his word. This is a proclamation of victory, not only of the victory of Jesus Christ over the power of sin and death, but our victory over the powers of darkness so that the whole world is to be brought into the realm of Christ and under his dominion, so that the knowledge of the Lord, as Isaiah tells us, shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Paul, thus, is telling the Christians of their corporateness in Jesus Christ. This is a heavy stress in Paul. He speaks again and again of the body of Christ, and that they are to be members one of another. Even as once they were members of the body of the fallen humanity of Adam, of the realm of Satan, now they are members of Christ and of one another in Jesus Christ.

The Roman Empire was made up of atomistic individuals. The atomism of Greek and Roman philosophy prevailed, and this is why Paul emphasizes so heavily our corporateness in the first or in the last Adam, and this is an emphasis that again must be made, because we, too, live in an age of atomism. Paul shows the unity of the old and of the new, the unity in their heard, and Paul is here laying the foundation for his statements concerning the church in Ephesians 5:21-33. Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism are doctrines stemming from Pelagius, which emphasized the freedom and the free will of man, his independence of God. So that in Pelagianism, salvation becomes a do-it-yourself project. Jesus Christ came only to show us how to save ourselves. As a result, Pelagianism led to atomism, social atomism. The corporateness of man in Christ was lost, and as a result, the doctrine of the church suffered.

Whenever man is Pelagian, or semi-Pelagian, he sees the possibilities of an independent approach to God. He can decide whether he’s going to go to God and to believe in him. He does not see sovereign grace, nor the work of Christ. Salvation becomes then a do-it-yourself project. Paul, in Ephesians, closes the door to the validity of any such thinking. He stresses the corporateness of man in Adam, or in Christ, and the implications of the resurrection for all of us, the mighty working of God has been manifest in Christ is now manifest in us, and must be manifested in and through us unto all peoples, nations, tribes, and tongues. We have been delivered, says Paul, from the course of this world, from its evil power, from our corporateness with a fallen world. We are delivered from that course, and we are placed into the body of Christ. We are made members one of another, and we are called to victory because the power of his resurrection is now the power of the church. It is a miracle-born church, and we are a miracle-born people by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. We move from death to life, from defeat to victory. “For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We are called to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, to be enthroned with him. It is our restoration to our covenant calling and office as prophet, priest, and king over the earth, and this is, Paul tells us, for the ages to come, for time and eternity. All of us who are raised up in Christ have a glorious and an eternal destiny with him.

Thus, when we speak of the power of the resurrection, we are speaking of what the early church in the didache and many another writing spoke of as the two ways, the two ways: the way of life and of victory, and the way of death and defeat. The way of sin as against the way of righteousness. They way of the powers of darkness and the way of the Lord. The doctrine of the two ways indicated very clearly that whatever weaknesses existed in the early church, they saw clearly the difference that Jesus Christ made. God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love, wherewith he loved us, has raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. This he has done by his sovereign grace.

Pelagianism leads to defeatism, to atomism. When the church forgets that it is miracle-born, and when we forget that we are miracle-born, born by the power of his resurrection and the regenerating power that is in the resurrected Christ, then we assume that all the power we have in our hands is a naturalistic power. We will assume, as we go to court against the humanists and the statists that all we have as we face them is a humanistic power, a naturalistic power. Surely we must use those powers which God has given us, but we must always remember that we stand in more than in our own power. We are a miracle-born church and a miracle-born people, and to see ourselves naturalistically is to limit the work of Christ and to limit the power of the church, and to limit the power of the believer. You and I are a miracle-born people in Christ, and hence, we pray as we did earlier for Zachery Wagner{?}, and for others, because the resources that are ours in Jesus Christ are more than natural. They are supernatural. We are, Paul says, by way of conclusion, his workmanship.

We all rejoice if we have a family background in history that is a distinctive one, and there are some who can trace their ancestry a long way back, and that is good. The scripture is full of an emphasis on the family, the most important institution in God’s sight, and the Bible gives a great many genealogies, not only of the line of Christ, but of others as well, which teaches us that we should respect and honor these things, and rejoice in them, but the most important fact about us that, apart from our natural heritage and ancestry, we have a supernatural birth, and a supernatural power and calling. We are his workmanship.

As Marcus Barth{?} paraphrases verse 10, “God himself has made us what we are in the Messiah Jesus, we are created. God ordains the good works which we are to walk in as our way of life.” The word that is used by Paul here in verse 10, when he says “good works,” the word “good,” we have in English, as a name, Agatha. Agatha means “good,” and that’s why the name was once so very popular in earlier days. Now, the word that we have in the name Agatha, and in the Greek translated into English as “good” means that which is good in character, in constitution, which is beneficial in nature, that which manifests a godliness which overcomes evil. Paul speaks of this in Romans 12:21. Good works. Not futile works, but good works which overcome evil, which are triumphant, because they are of God and God has created us. He has told us in his word, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” Here is my law-word. Here is the power word, the way of life, the way of power, and the good works for which I have created you, the works which are the works of power. It tells us something about the world of our day, that people believe that goodness is impotent and evil is powerful, that if you’re going to get ahead, because it’s a “Dog eat dog” world, why, you’ve got to forget about righteousness, about goodness, because that has no power. What this tells us is that our world believes in the prince of the powers of darkness, not in Jesus Christ. That it stands not in the resurrection, but in the fall of man, in the tempter’s program of Genesis 3:1-5. It puts its trust in Satan, not in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection.

God alone is absolutely good, our Lord tells us, and all good works therefore, manifest his power, his nature, and are in faithfulness to his law-word. We must, as children of the resurrection, believe in the impotence of evil and the power of God as manifested in good works. To believe in the power of good works is to deny Satan and Satan’s program. To deny the power of the good is to affirm the victory of Satan. The church of the resurrection is called to be a victorious church. Its Lord and Savior is he who is King of kings and Lord of lords, and he has called us to sit together with him on the throne of his realm. We cannot sit together with him if we do not believe in his word, and the power of the good works which he has called us to and ordained us for, but if we believe in him and are faithful to our calling, our ordination to good works, we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. Let us pray.

Thou hast made us, O Lord, and shall thy work {?}, thou hast made us and called us to sit together with Christ in heavenly places. Thou hast ordained us to good works and to the overthrow of the prince of the powers of the air. O Lord, our God, make us faithful to our calling that we may indeed be more than conquerors, that we may triumph in the face of the powers of darkness, over evil and sin, over the powers of humanism and statism, and bring every area of life and thought into captivity to Jesus Christ our Lord. Make us ever mindful that we are miracle-born, and that we are called to a miraculous destiny. Bless us to this end, we beseech thee, in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Are there any questions now? If there are no questions, let us bow our heads as we conclude in prayer.

Blessed art thou, O Lord, God of our Fathers, praise and exalted above all forever. We praise thee, we magnify thee, we rejoice in the glory of thy working, in thy grace to us in Jesus Christ. O Lord, our God, make us ever mindful how rich we are in Jesus Christ, and that we are a miracle-born and a miracle-powered people. In Jesus name. Amen.

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